Mardack told XBiz that he started a GFY thread on June 24 partially as a response to what was happening in the industry — the 2257 regulations were to go into effect that week and there was tension prior to notices of injunctive relief — and a belief that industry newcomers were often chased away from established webmaster forums with taunts of “newbie” or “noob”
“There needed to be a place people starting out in the business could go where they could be shown the ropes,” Mardack said.
The site features Mardack’s views on the basics of Internet success in the adult realm and also airs commentaries by regular contributors, including webmaster and editor Taia Kirby, porn performer Kayla Quinn, Pinkgasm.com “sexual superhero” Halcyon Styn, Pride-Bucks co-owner Harlan Yaffe and CCBill’s Andy Kiefer.
Mardack, who said he is not making money from this venture, told XBiz that he was “motivated by a desire to stop meanness, and alarmed by [the industry’s] asleep-at-the-wheel-ness” in creating a forum for novice Industry players to learn the rules of the trade.
Mardack was Alta Vista’s user experience manager from 1998 to 2000. After a three-year-layoff, he joined Palo Alto’s FriendFinder, Inc. Mardack left that company under a cloud earlier this year, with FriendFinder charging him and his eventual ProfitLab vice-president, Sean Barrett, with divulging trade secrets, among other charges. The case is still pending.
Mardack, who describes ImpoverishedNoobs as the result of “an altruistic urge” and a “karma hiccup,” said the forum’s text will be mostly replicated on GFY, where the seed of the concept flowered.
“I think [GFY administrator] Lensman contributed something amazing to the adult world with GFY,” Mardack said. “I have extraordinary gratitude for the forum that he has created; but there’s a thing that GFY can’t do for newcomers, and that's what I’m hoping the new site can.”
With ProfitLab, Mardack said that he realizes he was not the first person to think about a forum to bridge the adult and mainstream worlds. In fact, ImpoverishedNoobs’ Halcyon Styn was involved in a similar venture, 2003’s iBridge International, which stated similar goals but foundered.
Mardack characterizes his rhetoric about ImpoverishedNoobs as “high talk,” but feels the industry is ready for it. “We are the stewards of human sexual expression,” he told XBiz, “and we are wrapped in the purple cloak of the First Amendment.”